The Next Project

I’m expecting to start this summer, and have narrowed it down to two candidates (with the option of adding another at any time, naturally). Budget is estimated at $1,500 to launch and several hundred per month in advertising. I think I can have version 1.0 of the app saleable within 1 month of opening my IDE. Income projections for the two candidates are pretty disparate. The better option of the two, from my current research, would (with rather modest assumptions made about customer volume) probably exceed my current salary within a year of launch.

What is it? A web app (uh oh! I’ve drunk the Web 2.0 coolaid!). I anticipate using about zero Web 2.0 cruft, probably developing on LAMP (which is why I’m giving myself a full month, since its not conceptually harder than Bingo Card Creator), and having a 100% subscriptions revenue model, probably with 1-2 months free trial. The selling proposition is the same as e-junkie’s but targetted at a completely different vertical — “I’m going to make it easier for you to make a lot of money. You’re going to pay me a trivial amount every month and be happy to do it. We’ll be doing business together for YEARS.”

Issues: this app has money involved and there will be a lawyer brought in as insurance. I will probably need the design done by a professional. (There’s the budget, incidentally.) I’m not a web programmer (as a matter of fact, I hate it) and so I will have to learn a bit to do this. I am not as intimately aquainted with this vertical as I am with teaching, but still think I get it enough to do a fairly decent job. I have competition offering services which can accomplish the same general goal for cheaper, but I have at least three ideas why my method is uniquely superior, in a way which is readily apparent to the customer. I will be unhealthily dependent on a major corporation whose name, for once, does NOT start with G.

I anticipate being as open on this project as I have been with Bingo Card Creator, which means that after I have something to show you’ll be able to see it. Until then, this is sort of a memo to myself to not spend summer on videogames.

3 Comments on “The Next Project”

Patrick,
Can’t wait to see what you have going. Thanks for being so open and sharing your experiences with us. Without knowing what your product is, I would give you a general recommendation to make the free trial period shorter than 1-2 months. Unless the product is such that you cannot fully use it in the span of two weeks (like it manages moon phases?), then 14 days is ideal. Longer than that and the user has either completely forgotten about the product or has already decided to buy so you might as well welcome them onboard earlier.

I’ll second Ruby on Rails. For a web app, it’s pretty much the only way I’d go these days. It’ll be a bit different than anything you’re used to, but there’s plenty of help out there. You can email me, too, if you need help. Good Luck!